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Apache Today: E-Commerce Solutions: Template-Driven Pages

"The basis of all web sites is HTML, and that HTML is used to
implement your design. There are other elements of course,
graphics, and presumably the dynamic content of your site, but the
backbone of your site will be it's design and layout. Now, I'm no
expert on design--I can do a technical drawing, but ask me to come
up with a logo and then draw it, and I'm suddenly lost. We'll
therefore ignore the design issue, and instead concentrate on the
implementation!"

"Before we get on to the complexities of dynamically driven
sites, lets go back a step and look at a template-driven site that
uses Server Side Includes (SSI) to build up the pages.
Understanding the basics of SSI will help us to understand how
to use and employ templates... For this to work correctly, you
need to have Apache configured first to handle SSI, and then to use
the index.shtml file as a default. This is fairly
straightforward..."

"Using the exec SSI directive we can execute a CGI script
instead of embedding a static HTML file. Most sites actually
use this feature to include a site counter, but it can be used in
any situation where you want some dynamic content. On my site I've
used this as a way of introducing some random elements into the
various side panels that would otherwise have to be manually
selected on each page."